by Rudy Rucker
A loofy head trip. This was the kind of thing I should be using for, uh, something. But what? Maybe a way to make Dad qwet—without using Junko’s qwetter gun, or spitting on Dad or, god forbid, having sex with him. I wanted something loofy and fun.
Drawing on skills I hadn’t consciously known I had, I used cosmic logic to kindle a jive-ass quantum wetware mind-matter routine within my lungs. I tensed my chest, minting macromolecules, enriching my breath with a mist of qwet dots.
Walking to Dad’s bed, I leaned over him—and breathed into his face. He snorted, twitched, awoke, and stared at me, startled.
“What’s up, Zaddy,” he said, just like in the old days. He sat up slowly, carefully, expecting a hangover—but I could teep that he was feeling good. Better than he’d felt in a long time.
“You made him qwet!” exclaimed Loulou from across the room, sitting up disheveled on her couch, breasts bare. “All by yourself. You’re a wizard, Zad. Hi, Mr. Plant. Can you feel my mind?”
“Sweet bird of youth,” said Dad, in a wondering tone. “Thank you.”
“Can you get us into the Roller mansion?” asked Joey, slipping into his daily routine of asking for stuff. “We want to live there. We want to bring in a whole crew.”
“You want,” echoed Dad, teeping Joey’s vibes and not much liking them. He got up and looked out the window, his worldly eyes taking things in. It was sunny again, the wet grass green, and the trees mostly bare, with red and yellow leaves on the ground. Dad edged himself into cosmic mode and stood there with his fingers slightly twitching, as if he were holding a brush.
A minute later he was in robotic mode, and ready to chat. I told him about the mental switch and about the cosmic mode and about oblivious teep. Joey and Loulou began chiming in. We four got a nice vibe going—a mix of Loulou’s gestures, my tangled feelings, Joey’s jagged vibes, and Dad’s disengaged bemusement. His lucid paintings were in the mix as well.
“I like telepathy,” said Dad. “And—you know—that cosmic mode makes for a good high. That’s a selling point.”
“Not selling,” said Loulou. “Qwet’s going out for free. Junko Shimano’s gonna be giving it away before anyone even knows. Junko invented qwet, you know. And she’s gonna ask Jane Roller if she’s okay with making her family’s mansion into our base. Like Joey said.”
“I don’t see you and Jane as friends,” Dad told Loulou. He gave me a look, as if amused to see me embroiled in woman problems like him. “But maybe we four can take a ride over there. See what Weezie Roller says. There’s been some talk about me moving in with her. I suppose your qrude new pals don’t have roadspiders, Zad? That’s okay. We’ve got a couple of extras; they have webs in the trees. Eating squirrels and birds.”
Saying goodbye to Mom wasn’t as complicated as I’d expected. While we four were mounting our roadspiders, Mom came outside to see what was up. I told her something like the truth. And I offered to make her be qwet like Dad.
“Would Lennox and I get along better then?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “That would still up to the two of you. I do think qwet is going to help me as an artist. When I get some time.”
“Peace and quiet,” said Mom. “What an artist needs. Not a lot of wild running around. But I’ll think about the qwet, okay?” She had clay on her hands, and she was wearing her dusty potting clothes. She looked quite beautiful.
While Mom and I talked, Dad sat off to the side on his roadspider, wearing an expression of disengaged penitence, his eyes focused on the beyond. He’d already picked up on my trick of using cosmic mode to space out when hassles loomed.
“Fat drunken old fool,” Mom called to Dad as she went back inside.
We rode off, with Jericho pumping out some of his oof barks before following in our wake.
Junko Shimano met up with us on the way to the Roller mansion, riding her own roadspider and dressed in messy exercise clothes. She’d had supper with Jane last night. The bad news was that she hadn’t converted Jane to being a qwettie. The good news was that, as far as Jane was concerned, it was okay if a limited number of us camped out in the family mansion. But we’d have to talk to mother Weezie and to brother Kenny. If they okayed it, Jane might eventually come over with her new beau Whit Heyburn and check out the scene.
“Beau?” I challenged. “Has Jane gone crazy?”
“She did say beau,” confirmed Junko, enjoying the gossip. “Whit was taking Jane out after I had supper with her. She was already dressed. Amazing outfit. They were planning an all-night party at, uh, Kegel Kugel? And then maybe back to Whit’s place for breakfast. I think he lives in Glenview too. Jane says she and Whit are working on a business deal.”
“Kegel Kugel?” I had a brief sense of being the odd man out in a game of musical chairs. “That’s the luxor party club in that black ball on top of the Clark bridge. You have to be rich to get in there. Or be a high-end hooker. Jane shouldn’t go to Kegel Kugel at all. Not with Whit! He’s vicious to the core!”
“Maybe Jane’s desperate to get your attention,” said Junko. “Maybe this was a deliberate provocation.”
“Or…maybe it’s Whit that wants Zad’s attention,” put in Joey.
I didn’t return the banter. I was worried sick. Being a fuddydud. But now Loulou flashed me a laughing smile and I felt better. Footloose, right? Before long, Dad, Loulou, Joey, Junko and I were riding up the curving nurb grass avenue that led into Glenview from River Road. The land rose from the river into gullies and knobby hills. Atop a crest on the right was the immense, half-timbered mansion of the Carnarvon family. On the left was none other than the Heyburn family’s neo-classical, columned mansion. It was a full-size replica of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
If Jane was getting close to Whit, she might very well be at the Heyburns’ right now. Whit lived there with his servants; he’d moved his parents into a senior home downtown. Yes, I had a feeling that Jane was looking out one of those windows.
The walled Roller estate loomed ahead of us, fenced all around, and with a solidly built brick gate house—Weezie Roller’s domicile. The all-but-deserted main building was modeled on a Norman castle. It had immensely high battlements of sparkling gray limestone, and the walls were pierced by diamond-paned windows and corniced slits. Decorative turrets sprang from each turning; a substantial master tower crowned them all. Besotted by old movies, Jane’s grandfather had redesigned the place in the 2020s.
As we passed Weezie’s gate house and approached the limestone castle, our roadspiders grew skittish. A giant nurb jellyfish was hovering above the mansion, tethered to the pointed peak of the highest tower. The iridescent medusa was what we called a house balloon—with well-appointed rooms on her lower level, hydrogen-filled bladders on her upper level, and dangling tentacles below. A braid of her tentacles was fastened to the tower.
“Kenny’s place,” said Joey. “She’s called Laputa.”
“I know all about her,” I said. “Kenny had Jane and me over for dinner a few months back, along with Whit Heyburn and Reba Ranchtree. Kenny and his boyfriend Kristo. Kenny got wasted and tried to push me out through a porthole. I don’t know how Kristo puts up with him.”
“I’ve seen Kenny from afar,” interposed Loulou. “He’s handsome. That counts for a lot. If you’re an ugly jerk—forget it. But good-looking jerks are romantic and damned.”
“Intriguing bohemians,” Dad said to Joey and me. “Eh, boys? I guess you’d call yourself an artist too, Joey? I know about those exploding paint-nurbs you made. Redecorate your home in one go. I got paid to restore a parlor where you’d ruined one of my murals. Interesting colors in your bomb—I turned one of your splotches into a butterfly. Here, I’ll message the color to you.” Dad was enjoying our outing, and happy to be qwet.
A rock thudded into the ground beside us, then another and another. Our roadspiders made herky-jerky evasive moves. Joey lost his seat and fell to the ground. The seeming rocks uncurled to become many-legged gray scuttlers—o
vergrown versions of those woodlice or pillbugs that you find in rotting leaves. They were staring at us with bright eyes—analyzing our images and searching out info. Jericho nosed at them uncomprehendingly. A hundred meters above us, a maniac laughed.
“I hate you, Kenny!” screamed Joey, shaking his fist.
“Come on up!” called Kenny. His head was a small dot in one of the flying jellyfish’s portholes. “Brunch time! Bloody Marys! Zad the loser, broken-down Mr. Plant, crazy Joey Moon, slutty Loulou Sass and—Junko the geek!” A kind word for everyone.
Turning to Loulou and me, Junko tensely asked, “How can that creep instantly decree that I’m a geek?”
Loulou fielded this one. “Maybe it’s that your hair’s all lank and it’s in a high folded-over pony-tail and you’re wearing a gray sweatsuit with no bra. Any Louisvillian can see you’re not a Collegiate School girl.”
“I hate it when people call me a geek,” said Junko. “I’m going to get even with Kenny for that.”
We parked Jericho and our roadspiders in the stable beside the mansion. Dad walked back down the hill to visit with Weezie in the gate house. And I led the others up the manor steps. I glanced over towards the Heyburn estate again, but I couldn’t see the elegant brick mansion from here. Stop obsessing, Zad.
The nurb lock on the Rollers’ old oaken doors recognized me as a member of the extended family, and it let us come in.
In my boyhood the castle’s interior had been pure old-school—walnut wainscoting, ornate glass panels, dangling brass lamps, Spanish tiles, parquet wood floors, and oriental carpets. Over the years Mr. Roller had added a mad hodgepodge of nurb upgrades. Given that he’d expanded his business from producing nurb chow to marketing the nurbs themselves, he had access to the latest and greatest. Over wife Weezie and daughter Jane’s objections, Mr. Roller had evolved the mansion’s interior into a bizarre and bustling nurb habitat. Son Kenny had been all for it.
Right in the front hall, Mr. Roller’s favorite nurb armchair had recently given birth to a litter of four-footed baby chairs. Normally, nurbs couldn’t reproduce, but Mr. Roller had removed the crippleware sterility codes from this one particular chair. He liked giving copies of it to his friends, and by now there were twenty or thirty of them loose in the house. The baby chairs scampered away from us, their woody legs pattering on the yielding flesh of the front parlor’s nurb rug. A nurb chandelier thrust a pair of brassy stalks around a corner, peering at us with dim eyebulbs.
At the far end of the hall lay a mound of busted-open Roller nurb chow bags, and beyond that was the mansion’s enormous ballroom. I surmised that Kenny and Kristo—or their helper nurbs—were hauling in food to keep the mansion’s menagerie alive.
I saw a hungry nurb teapot on the mound of chow, grubbing with its spout. A bendy grandfather clock used its pendulum like a tongue. The newborn leather chairs were rooting into the food, as were their older siblings, not to mention a clutch of slithery rugs. A fat couch bellied up beside them, with a toothy mouth beneath its plump arm. A pair of table lamps fluttered above the lode, their shades pulsating against the air.
Kenny’s pillbug nurbs had followed us inside, and now they scooted past us towards the chow. Their excessively numerous feet made an unpleasant skritching sound on the floor.
“Like jungle animals at a watering hole,” observed Junko. “See the tendrils running down from the ceiling. It’s all covered with nurby growth up there. Colored fungus?”
“Old Weezie hated it when Mr. Roller installed that stuff,” I recalled. “He’d always wanted a fancy coffered ceiling like in the lobby of the Brown Hotel downtown. A 1920s movie theater look, you wave, with embossed squares and polychrome flowers and cartouche scenes of dancing nymphs. So he got some hairball in the United Mutations lab to design a nurb lichen that was supposed to emulate all that. But it’s not even close.”
“Totally fubar,” said Joey, his head thrown back. “The shapes are layered like in the motion trails you see when you’re good and high. Like solid scribbles. More inspiration, huh, Zad?”
“I’m feeling those rank colors,” said Loulou. “They hurt my sinuses almost. For sure I’d wear a dress of that.”
“Mrs. Roller got worried that spores were drifting down from the ceiling and poisoning her food,” I said. “That’s when she moved down to the gate house. A year after that, Mr. Roller died of cancer. Jane said he had some sick growths on his back. Like daffodils and shamrocks.”
“Don’t want that!” said perky Junko. “A standard way to retrofit this place might be to get some firepigs and flame out the nurbs. Only—a place this infested, the building might burn down.” Junko paused, looking around. “Plan B could be to make all these guys qwet—and then do some teep-based biomodding on them, if they’ll hold still.”
“The nurbs might rebel once they’re qwet,” I warned, looking around the freaky house. “Skungy the rat is qwet, for instance, and he’s known to bite people. Poor Skungy. I wonder if he’s still with the cops.”
“Plan C would be to set loose some cannibal nurbs to eat the excess nurbs,” continued Junko. “Banzai beetles and degenerated sea cucumbers.”
“Why not we use our bad-ass qwet rats for the clean up?” said Joey. “I like the rats better than—what was that you just said, Junko? Stink cucumbers and bung beetles?”
“Rare species,” said Junko with a half smile. “High-priced. The qwet rats could be fine.”
“There’s a buttload of my rat brothers in stasis on Gaven’s farm,” said Joey.
“You know about them, huh?” said Junko. “Gaven was warehousing them. Okay, let’s activate the rats and sic them on these scurvy nurbs. Safer than going bananas with my qwetter. Even though—down the line, I predict that every living thing will be qwet. A better world. My goal.”
“Did you build yourself a simplified qwetter like you said?” asked Loulou.
“It’s in my dyke geek sweatsuit pocket here,” said Junko. “I bummed our old design down to ten parts and then I replaced it with a biomodded yam—just like I said I’d do.”
“I can make a nurb qwet with my spit,” said Loulou proudly.
“I can do it with my breath,” I bragged.
“But before we get into all this I want to go up to that flying jellyfish,” said Junko. “We’ll confront Mr. Judgmental Male Gaze. Speak truth to power. I’ll qwet Kenny and his jellyfish house both. Put them in teep contact. I’m betting the big jelly has some grudges against Kenny boy. We’ll watch the show.”
“Once Cap’n Junk here is done with Kenny he’ll be glad to let us live in the family manse,” said Joey.
Leaving Kenny’s feeding pillbugs behind, we ascended the first flight of stairs. The second floor had held the bedrooms, and was now a dimly lit jungle of wiry bedspring vines, with hairbrushes and hankies flitting through the tangled thickets like wild birds. Rabbity pillows foraged in the undergrowth; fat beds lolled like cows. Three tattered humanoid figures were crawling about, their expressions fixed in vegetal leers.
“Sex nurbs,” I explained. “Weezie and Mr. Roller were into them for awhile— before people knew about the sex nurb diseases. They kept these three on, partly as a joke, and partly because Kenny liked watching the sex nurbs do it with each other.”
“Eew,” said Junko. “I never grasped that you heartlanders could be so stark. I’ll definitely clear out this floor. The qwet rats can gnaw most of it down. Turn it into squeaks. And we’ll eliminate those sex puppets, for sure.”
“They’re lurching towards us like pervy zombies,” said Loulou. “I wonder if they’re good at what they do.”
“I’m better,” said Joey.
We clattered up the next flight of stairs. In pre-nurb days the third floor had held Jane’s and Kenny’s play rooms. A couple of Jane’s talking toys wandered over to us—a monkey banging cymbals while he sang, and a high-voiced rhinoceros doll. I’d seen these two before, and they knew my name. They made me miss Jane. Her voice, her gait, her bouncin
g mop of hair. I walked to the window, but the Heyburn house was still out of view.
Two rival flocks of nurb vegetables interrupted my reverie—it was carrots versus beets up here. In the old days, Weezie had kept a kitchen garden going on this floor, using a drip system and big troughs of dirt. She claimed the light was better on the third floor—woodsy Glenview was shady.
Today the carrots were speeding about like hyperactive inchworms, and the beets ricocheted off the walls. They were vying to press the most foliage to the sunny windows—when they weren’t rooting in their wet dirt.
Fungal puffballs slid in the wake of the animated vegetables, buffing the wooden floors. A long-legged feather-duster stalked about, cleaning root-grit off the nurb chairs and tables. And a platoon of tiny flying dinosaurs were ferrying in nurb chow, carrying the nuggets in their beaks.
“I like this floor just like it is,” enthused Joey. “It’s stone cold perfect.”
“What if you wait here and guard our rear,” suggested Junko. “Just in case something goes wrong with Kenny and the flying jellyfish.”
“Fine by me,” agreed Joey. “I’ll try and call Skungy and Sissa. See if they’ve broke out. And don’t you go sneakin’ off with Loulou, Zad.”
A spiral staircase led to the tower room—a round chamber a few yards in diameter, and fully jammed with the writhing, slimy, translucent tentacles of Laputa the hovering house jelly. Her tendrils were feeding on yet another stash of Roller nurb chow. Several of the strands displayed eyestalks. Laputa was observing us. She had a rudimentary intelligence—but nothing like the intelligence she’d have if we managed to make her qwet.
“Hop on,” blubbered a slit mouth in the side of a thick tentacle. “Free ride.” The tentacle was festooned with sling seats like bights of rope.
“It’s fine,” I told the others. “I’ve been up here before.” Not letting ourselves think about it too much, Loulou, Junko and I hopped aboard.